When it
comes to North Korea and defusing its nuclear crisis,
the United States is finding that South Korean President
Roh Moo-hyun, who wants to be friends with North Korea,
is becoming increasingly obstructionist. US
neo-conservatives want to play hard
ball, very hard
ball, with Pyongyang, and say South Korea is too soft.
Who's side is Seoul on, anyhow? they ask.

Roh made clear just how soft - and infuriating to the
US - his policy is when he addressed the
World Affairs Council in Los Angeles on his way to
the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Chile. Roh, never
one to mince words, stunned many in the
audience of foreign-policy experts with his assertion
that the central argument underpinning North
Korea's nuclear-weapons program - that it is a necessary defense in
the face of hostility and threat - is not
entirely illogical. But it was a shocking, if frank, pronouncement,
to be sure.

Neo-cons are arguing that
the US needs to be a lot tougher with North Korea,
assuming that all efforts to date in "six-party talks"
are going nowhere fast. What is needed, they say, is to
plan for economic sanctions or an embargo and at least
to plan for military strikes, in hopes these moves
will bring Pyongyang to its senses. Conservative scholar at the
American Enterprise Institute Nicholas Eberstadt said in
an interview with the Seoul Shinmin two weeks ago that
"we've come to doubt whether South Korea is sincerely
interested in the denuclearization of the Korean
Peninsula".

Last Friday, US General Leon
J Laporte, the current commander of US troops in
Korea, responded in kind by reiterating that there was a
very real threat of fissile-material proliferation from "cash-strapped"
North Korea. But the restatement of the wider
threat is an argument South Koreans have heard many
times before, its resonance having faded among most of
them in recent years.

The "Korean problem", many
now believe, is for Koreans to solve.

Every
declaration between North and South dating back to the
1972 Basic Agreement, the first joint communique between
the two Koreas, has firmly and unequivocally defined the
issue of national division as something to be resolved
"independent" of foreign involvement.

Issues of wider security and potential regional
instability are peripheral to most Koreans. South Korea is not a nation
with a strong vision of the world beyond its
frontiers. Yes, it's a major exporting power, and yes, the
world beyond, most would at least partially agree, is vital
to South Korea's prosperity and perhaps stability,
but when matters turn to the North, another truth emerges. For
most, the North Korea "threat" is so much detritus from
a bygone era, a political machination by
anachronistically conservative political forces.

Primarily, Korean identity is a product of
ethnicity, a perceived homogeneity that binds the Korean
nation. Koreans on both sides of the Demilitarized Zone
believe their culture and ethnicity is sui
generis , a unique product of 4,000 years
of shared history. This historical connection, the "one
blood, one nation" identity, has been a central tenet
of political rhetoric in both Koreas for more than 50 years. But
since division, political ideology exclusive to both North
and South has been woven into the fabric of ethnic
identity, and it is these competing political ideologies
from which the past half-century of quasi-peace stems.

Political structures (hierarchies) in
both Koreas have long espoused the ethnic singularity
of Korea while positing their political ideology
and political structure as the vessel that captures
and protects true "Koreaness". Syngman Rhee, South Korea's
first president, refused to sign the 1953 armistice,
instead insisting on US support for a march on the North
to vanquish the communists and unify the peninsula, a
march which never came about. South Korea's third
president, Park Chun Hee, the one most closely associated
with unprecedented economic growth and development from
1961-79, articulated an ideology of "anti-communism"
with implicit reference to the protection of ethnic
Korea. The North's Marxist ideologues, he proclaimed,
were anti-Confucian, and as such anti-Korean.

North Korea, for its part, portrays
the southern half of the Korean Peninsula as a territory
of supplicants, puppets of the American imperialists.
Nam-Chosun, or South Korea, being little more
than a proxy of the US, a nation bent on the destruction
and subordination of all Korea.

Given the
underlying ethnic homogeneity acknowledged throughout
Korea, politically crafted identities designed to
position one political ideology as the natural
embodiment of ethnic Korea, while at the same time
undermining the political legitimacy of the other, is to
be expected. But policy successes in South Korea have
led to a softening of the image and threat of the North
among large swaths of South Korean society, prompting a
radical rethink of the past 50 years of "political"
division.

A recent online poll conducted in
conjunction with one of South Korea's newest online
news websites, the Frontier Times, indicates
that about 20% of Koreans surveyed believe the
South should ally with the North in the event of a US
attack, with a further 30% not sure which side they
should take. Of course, the specific phrasing of the
question and the manner in which the poll was conducted
can affect the efficacy; however, anecdotally, the
numbers seem roughly consistent with what is felt on the
ground in South Korea: most specifically, the undecided 30%.

So how does all this affect the growing nuclear crisis in North Korea and
the credibility of the six-party talks? South Korea's "see
no evil" policy toward North Korea makes any
attempt at regional coercion and pressure incomplete as
the South continues to let it be known
that punishment is not a component of the engagement package. Finding a
regional solution to an issue Roh's administration perceives
as intrinsically bilateral is unlikely. The six
parties are North and South Korea, China, Japan, Russia
and the US. The next round has not been scheduled
since North Korea protested that South Korea's secret nuclear
experiments in the past must be thoroughly investigated,
but it is well known that Kim Jong-il was hoping
for a John Kerry presidential win in the United
States, and was postponing the talks until after the
elections, convinced that the atmosphere would be more
convivial and flexible with a Democrat in the White
House.

The danger to South Korea, of course,
remains since North Korea has not encouraged a similar
identity shift and mitigated the political threat as has
South Korea. Indeed, the evidence suggests that
Pyongyang has not taken any steps to remove or reduce 50
years of political perpetuated identity ideology that
underpins the system - the politically posited socially
enforced belief that North Korea holds the obvious
position of Korean national leadership. This was always
the danger of former president Kim Dae-jung's, now
Roh's, policy. When reciprocity was abandoned and
unilateralism was formed into the cornerstone of the
engagement process, the impetus and motivation for North
Korea to take steps in tandem with the South to remove
the threat perception of the other was negated.

Today, North Korea still depicts South Korea
as a puppet controlled by US imperialists. It still
define itslef as the true protector and maintainer of the
Korean nation. Indeed, the South Korean formula of
reconciliation espoused by Kim Dae-jung and actively
encouraged by Roh calls for a co-federal structure and
reconciliation that is strikingly similar to North
Korea's 1980 proposal for a Democratic Federal Republic
of Koryo since it calls for, among other things, a
removal of the National Security Law, the withdrawal of
US troops, and unification free of "foreign
interference".

Still, whether South Korea's
policy choices are reasoned and rational from a foreign
perspective is perhaps less pertinent now. South Korea
has chosen the road they wish to travel, and this needs
to be more fully acknowledged by the US. Indeed,
President George W Bush's words of understanding in
response to Roh's insistence on a "dialogue only"
approach to the North Korean nuclear issue indicates
that the present administration in Washington has come
to "understand" South Korea's unwavering approach,
though unlike South Korea the US will keep options on
the table to force North Korea to abandon its nuclear
weapons programs.

Indeed, critics of Roh's
approach within South Korea feel that just focusing on
the nuclear issue is not enough as, according to Kim
Tae-woo, a policy expert at South Korea's Institute for
Defense Analysis, "If we solve the nuclear problems by
confining the agenda only to nuclear issues, than what
next? Will we just tolerate the North Korean
human-rights problem, missiles and chemical weapons and
biological weapons? It begs the question, is it now
incumbent on the US and the region to accept that the
nuclear program, like other nefarious traits of the
North Korea regime, may best be managed within a
framework comprising those countries with security
concerns and policy priorities that reach beyond the
Korean peninsula; is the North Korean threat best
tackled independent of South Korea?"

David
Scofield, former lecturer at the Graduate Institute
of Peace Studies, Kyung Hee University, is currently
conducting post-graduate research at the School of East
Asian Studies, University of Sheffield, United Kingdom.